These notes accompany the screenings of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s King Kong, October 13, 14, and 15 in Theater 3.

I was reticent about including Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s King Kong in this series. True, we’ve already shown the filmmakers’ classic documentary, Grass (1925), but, in the eight intervening years, the filmmakers seem (at least superficially) to have moved in a very different direction. Read more

Calling Merian C. Cooper (1893–1973) and Ernest B. Schoedsack (1893–1979) auteurs may seem like fudging a little bit, but I don’t think it is. Yet the doubt creeps in on two levels. First, while film is undeniably a collaborative medium, the auteur theory argues that there is a singular dominant creator. The bond between these guys, however, seems so seamless in their films as to be almost unique. The other reason for hedging is that they first made their collaborative mark in documentary film, a form that presupposes that the director cannot mold his material as freely as can the maker of narrative films. (It has become obvious in subsequent decades that even the most “pure” cinéma vérité is subject to manipulation at the hands of masters like Jean Rouch or Fred Wiseman.) And it is, of course, true that immediately after Grass, Cooper and Schoedsack began to move away from authentic actuality. Read more

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